Your nerves are like muscles. Too little use and they fade away, too much use and you can damage them. The sensors in your joints and muscles send signals up to the brain, so the brain can build a map of your body. These signals also help the brain stay healthy. It’s thought that that as much as 90% of the stimulus the brain receives in a day comes from the joints and muscles so good function in them is important for brain health. The amount of activity in your brain has a large impact on your muscle tone. If your brain isn’t firing on all cylinders then the muscles around your joints won’t be balanced properly, which can leave you more vulnerable to injury. The level of function of your brain also has a massive impact on your organs. 90% of the output from your brain is involved in the control of your organs, suggesting implications for level of brain function and general health.

Your Brain Needs Good Body Movements

1. When muscles contract, your bones move. Muscles work in pairs. One moves two bones together, it’s partner moves them apart. When one muscle in the pair contracts, the other should relax.
2. Muscles and joints send signals to your brain through sensory receptors, that monitor the movement and position of your joints. When the two surfaces of a joint are optimally aligned a lot of sensory signals are sent up to your brain. When your joints are out of position or not moving properly the receptors send much fewer signals. It’s like your brain can’t ‘see’ the joint. Your brain then has to make it’s best guess where that part of your body is. Instead the brain starts to perceive that area of the body as pain.
3. The sensory receptors send their signals through both your subconscious and conscious pathways.
4. Subconscious signals from the muscles first arrive at an area of your brain called the cerebellum. This compares the messages from your body about what it is actually doing with the signals from your brain about what it wants to do and checks if there are any errors. This constant blending of subconscious signals from muscles all around your body allows your cerebellum to help coordinate the accuracy of your body movements and help set the right tone in your muscles. It’s also thought to be involved in some of your cognitive functions such as attention and language as well as helping regulate your emotional responses. Another important input to the cerebellum is from the balance canals near your ears. Overall this exchange of information between your cerebellum and your body allows your muscles to keep you standing up straight and move you around with efficiency without you even having to think about it.
5. The cerebellum sends its unconscious motor signals to two places, back to the muscles on the same side to help modulate them and up to your thalamus.
6. The thalamus acts as a ‘switchboard’ rapidly integrating the conscious and subconscious messages, and relays sensory and motor signals to and from the outer layer of your brain, the cerebral cortex. It also regulates your consciousness, sleep and alertness and has a controlling effect on hormone release. It’s function is almost totally based upon the stimulation of sensory receptors. Almost all sensory information must pass through the thalamus before reaching the cortex.
7. Your cortex is the main area that controls your muscle response based on all the sensory input it receives, so your brain can both consciously and unconsciously control your muscles to move your joints. If the brain isn’t coordinating your muscles and joints properly, then you are much more likely to injure yourself and the area is much more likely to be stressed making it wear out – see degenerative joints/ osteoarthritis.

Your Body Depends On Good Brain Function

Your joints are dependent upon the muscles for their stability so the whole mechanism must be balanced. If your muscles don’t contract properly, your joints will be unbalanced. The muscles are dependent on your cortex working at its highest level of function, because it controls and modifies the rest of your body. The cortex is dependent on your thalamus’ overall level of stimulation. The thalamus itself is dependent upon two areas for its stimulation: unconscious signals from your cerebellum which must be at their optimal level of stimulation because your muscles depend upon cerebellar input to maintain good structural stability. Secondly input from the conscious sensory receptors in your muscles and joint that are responsible for joint stability. The cerebellum itself receives afferent signals from the receptors in the muscles on the same side of the body.

The receptors that are stimulated by your muscles and joints, are largely responsible for your accurate sense of how your joints are positioned. If the signals to your lower brain (cerebellum and thalamus) are inadequate because your joints are not moving properly, then the information sent to your cortex will also be flawed and it will build a faulty map of where it thinks your body is. Your cortex will work less optimally. This compromise in your brain causes inaccurate motor signals to reach your muscles, which leads to a loss of joint integrity and a further breakdown in the quality of signals to your brain. It is a degenerative cycle that impacts your whole body function. We call this disafferentation, a reduction in sensory input to an area that should have otherwise been stimulated. We know like muscles, the brain needs the right amount and type of stimulation otherwise it gets damaged – it’s the ‘use it or loose it’ principle.

This breakdown causes an imbalanced body to send mistimed signals. These errors in timing disrupt the natural coordination and flow of your nervous system. Your brain can only respond to what it receives. When your brain receives flawed incoming signals it responds with defective outgoing signals to wherever the signals would go, including to the glands and organs. A commonly mentioned statistic in functional neurology is that 90% of the daily input to your brain comes from sensors in the joints and muscles (mainly the spine) and 90% of it’s output goes to your organs.

In order to correct this physiological breakdown, your chiropractor must understand how to address the muscles and joints to encourage the right kind of receptor stimulation to the brain that resets optimal muscle function.

From a chiropractic view, the key to interrupting this vicious cycle of breakdown is to physically interact with your joints and muscles (and other tissues which send signals to your nervous system) in a way that works to help your individual function and restore good sensory feedback. This instantly excites the cerebellum and thalamus, which then stimulate the cortex. Increasing your cortical function helps it regain normal control of your joints and muscles. This leads to normal receptor stimulation of your cerebellum, thalamus and brain, and back again to the muscles, stabilising the brain’s functions. This increases your joint position sense and steadiness, and re-establishes your brain’s control over the body.

It’s important for you to understand this cycle of structure and function, so you know why it’s important to your health and so you can reclaim your optimal performance.

Optimal afferentation (signals from the sensors) is the stimulus that keeps your nervous system healthy and strong. Your vibrant, cognitive and physical health depends upon you having a healthy nervous system. As we have discussed muscle and joint motion sets the foundation of activity in the nervous system, influencing your brain. They act like batteries for your brain.

Signals from your joints and muscles influence the activity of the thalamus. The thalamus itself controls a region called the hypothalamus, which links to your pituitary gland. This connection is the bridge between the nervous system and hormones. The hypothalamus manages the overall functions of the nervous system that are not under voluntary control: hormonal system, autonomic nervous system and certain behaviours. Hormones released by your pituitary are involved in: regulating the daily cycles influencing your physiological state, temperature regulation, thirst, appetite, sexual function, sleep and wakefulness, stress response and certain emotional reactions. The hormones release influence various organs around the body which respond by sending specific hormones back to the hypothalamus. This feedback allows the hypothalamus to modulate it’s output to keep the whole system in functional balance.

Well hopefully you now have a better understanding of why us chiropractors at Back-in-Action like to make sure your joints, muscles and nervous system are working at their best and why we so emphasise that in keeping you healthy. If your ready for a chiropractic check-up, give Back-in-Action a call on 01772 749389 to help keep your body and brain working together.